The Hoover Dam and the man on the moon aside, the US really doesn't do grand pharaonic missions and monuments that well. Both were created as morale-boosting stunts by centralizers, while America's greatest successes have come from decentralized action driven by the profit motive. What the US does well is to allow entrepreneurs to flourish. In today's competitive world, for the US to retain its place as the incubator of new ideas and technology and the companies that exploit them, it must open its doors to the entrepreneurs of the world, by reforming its immigration laws and creating a bureaucratic environment that welcomes new businesses. It should actively seek to retain the foreign graduates of its top schools and encourage them to exploit their ideas here. It should actively encourage more of its own talented young to enter productive professions (i.e. not finance, law or medicine).

So please, no more monuments to the power of central government. That is not America's way. We are much more the home of Edison's light bulb and Jobs' Macintosh than Hoover's dam. We can still make the eyes of a young Indian or Chinese engineer gleam with visions of a successful new startup. That is America's niche; we must exploit it to the hilt.

Actually the Hoover dam or something like it could be done today. It just needs to be authorized in the legislation and said that no one can challenge it based on any other act. If they did that we could knock them things like a national energy grid, or high speed rail system relativlty quickly.

No 10 year environmental reports, or long drawn our emenimnent domain claims. just plan it and build it.

When the U.S. spends on infrastructure today, one third the money goes to consultants, and another third goes to the pensions and health benefits of retired construction workers. That leaves one-third for the work, which is also expensive.

There was no "prevailing wage" legislation back in the early 1930s, which promises construction workers on federally funded projects the highest wage and benefit package ever achieved in an area regardless of how sustainable it was. Workers were paid the hard times market wage on that and other projects.

FDR cut federal pay 10%. And the depression wiped out the wealth of the wealthy because there was no bail out of financial assets. They had to go back to earning their keep as well.

I am not a big fan of Obama's infrastructure "stimulus" notions, for most of the reasons cited in the article. However, I do recognize that certain types of infrastructure can provide a substantial boost to economic growth, the Hoover Dam being one of them.

Even though the dam construction only employed a few thousand workers, the real value of the dam is the electricity that it generates and continues to generate. It is all clean electricity, and more importantly it is provided in massive quantities. Cheap power fuels economic growth by allowing factories and businesses to run more cheaply, especially those businesses involved in manufacturing that relies on electricity to run its heavy equipment.

This is why I am dismissive of plans to build bridges and repave roads -- such infrastructure should be performed because it is needed, and we should not delude ourselves into thinking it is economic "stimulus". On the other hand, if we were to build more clean power plants, like hydroelectric dams or nuclear plants, those would be stimulus projects that keep giving economic benefits for decades, because they are projects that actually MAKE something -- electricity.

There is a good reason the Hoover dam could not be built today: it is an obsolete, old-school project, both in terms of environmental impact and central government over-reach. In short, a scheme for both sides of the political fence to find fault with.

"Ohio" is spot on when he says: We are much more the home of Edison's light bulb and Jobs' Macintosh than Hoover's dam.

I would like to add: Burt Rutan, Sergei Brin, Mark Zuckerburg, and the myriad of backyard tinkerers, software developers and university research departments. When I drove across the Hoover Dam I was mildly impressed. When I went to the Jet Propulsion Lab's open house and saw the robot rovers in their "Mars Yard" test area, I (who am not normally the most patriotic sort) was filled with pride and wonder at these little, yet amazing machines.

If the US wants to embark on a grandiose project, how about the ultimate morale boost: a genuine and fair reform of our ridiculous tax system?

Is it so terrible that America could not undertake a project such as the Hoover Dam today? No. Is it so terrible that, apart from the vaguest suggestions immediately dismissed for being fiscally infeasible, politically unsupportable, or both, few seem to give any indication of wanting to? That may be a different matter.

Environmentalist put legal roadblocks that will delay a project for decades until all the original suitors are dead or demented.

NIMBYism: Not in My Back Yard Property Owners are equally prickly and over empowered. A project that will benefit millions is held up for the rights of a single curmudgeon loony property owner who wants his privacy to walk around his backyard nude.

As yu point out, America's problems are an outgrowth of its success - but that does not make it any easier on the receiving end. For a long time, America pulled itself away from the rest of the world in its economic superiority, thus developing tremendous wage differentials with other countries and making many low-end jobs disappear naturally. Now, the advent of the IT revolution is making even high-end jobs disappear fast, in effect, erasing national boundaries and creating one vast pool of potential workers.

As much as any politician loves to see steel beams errected and concrete poured, with all of the corrupt union jobs to go with it, I'm not sure building "Big" is that relevant to modern society. It has been many years since human advancement has been measured in terms of tonnes of steel. It is now measured in units of bits or possibly in genomes. The world has moved on... we ought to move on with it.

WT
You do not seem to understand that "prevailing wage" is the market wage for a geographic area. I can only assume that you would prefer that the jobs be bid on so that the lowest skilled illegal willing to work for five dollars an hour would set the standard for the rest of the workers.

Unfortunately you are not lacking for company in your efforts to race to the bottom.

There are times when entrepreneurs know better than to embark on big projects, and now is such a time. With so much uncertainty no smart entrepreneur is going to get a loan for such a project, and those with cash piles have already decided that a cash pile is the right thing to have at the moment. When they have used it to buy out those who fall by the wayside, once they have secured the quasi-monopolistic status that enables them to command their bit of the economy, and once they can see in the newly growing economy secure prospects of future profits, only then will they invest.

The government has to show the leadership to take us into that situation, because they are the only organisation that can. The anti-stimulus naysayers are sticking us in the mud.

Deficit is not a good place to be. Sadly, until we start an upturn we slowly sink deeper into it as more of the 99% leave the growth economy for the subsistence economy. We could indeed wait until the subistence economy is the only thing left, and grow from there, as the naysayer tell us. But we could do better.

Instead of moaning about the drip feed into deeper recession until we reach bottom, we could decide to use deficit funding in a positive move to turn the ship around. If we do it soon enough, the accumulated deficit on the upturn is more manageable than the larger deficit we inherit from the long descent. On the other hand, if we leave it long enough, the nay-sayers will be right; we will be so near the bottom that we simply have to tough it out.

The grand development, not necessarily another dam but ideally an alternative energy source (geothermal or regular as clockwork tidal, for instance) will return an ongoing dividend. The stimulus is going into capital investment not the revenue spend of toughing it out, and the deficit can be remedied more swiftly if necessary by selling the facility into the newly functioning economy.

While it only makes a small number of direct jobs, the stimulus goes straight into salaries. These salaries are the new money in the economy, which goes straight into consumer demand. Systemic stimulus programs work indirectly and inefficiently. They rely on the new money finding its way into jobs (via entrepreneurs who are not seeking loans at the moment) and only thence into the paychecks of consumers.

Systemic stimulus has a hole in the bucket, dear Lisa.

Leaving stimulus to soak into the economy means it will probably soak in pro-rata with 40% of it finding its way into the pockets of the 1%, and much of the rest finding its way into the corporate war chests waiting for the upturn. For stimulus to work it must be targeted at a new project.

I think the US could accomplish a project as big as the Hoover Dam, but I agree it has to be relative to the time. Obama has the right idea of doing a green project. A large sized solar powered project would get a lot of support, and would boost the environmental movement that much more. The more we use sustainable energy sources, the more money the US would save, not to mention the drop in environmental damage we cause.

A dam is a great way to try and get energy in a "green" way. The only problem is the environmentalists that will try and stop a new dam from being built. Building a new dam will get more jobs and over all be a help to the economy. The U.S. just needs to get the approval and the money for this project.